


Black 2.0

by Darkerchild



Category: Vantablack pigment feud RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Confusion, Inspired by Art, Other, RPF, Weirdness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-08
Updated: 2017-12-08
Packaged: 2019-02-12 01:14:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12948123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darkerchild/pseuds/Darkerchild
Summary: At first, I thought that it was some kind of artistic statement.





	Black 2.0

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Marks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marks/gifts).



At first, I thought that it was some kind of artistic statement.

I didn’t agree with it, but that’s art: you don’t have to like it to appreciate the work that went into it. I figured Kapoor was making some kind of statement about how the elite keep all the toys to themselves and we’re all so used to it that we’ve forgotten to be outraged. So… I did what I thought he wanted and provided the voice of outrage –

“How dare you be so petty? There should be no copyright on art! #Sharetheblack” Yada, yada. I believed it, but at that point it was mostly for show. I thought we were both playing the same game. Sly smiles and knowing winks across the Twittersphere.

And the thing is, he’s right that there’s precedent for artists guarding their technique. Protecting secrets of the craft goes right back to the ateliers of Renaissance Florence. Back to stone age medicine men guarding the sacred methods of blending ochre and animal fat together to dab an Auroch on the wall of an underground rock wall in France. But there’s a world of difference between that and modern copy-right law. Kapoor didn't develop Vantablack or earn it via some arcane initiation rite; he bought the rights before anyone else could. Besides which, we aren’t living in caves. This is the Information Age. This is the world coming together and sharing and trying to better itself.

People have told me that I’m too optimistic for my own good, but I think the idea that real art requires pessimism and depression and a bottle of whiskey is total shit. Florescent pink is as valid a medium of artistic expression as Vantablack and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Looking back on it, I may have been letting some of my own hang-ups muddy the waters.

All of this is a prelude to explain why, when Kapoor sent me a text invite to see his newest exhibition at his workshop before it was carted off to be installed at some mall in Dubai, I didn’t think twice about replying yes, despite the fact that the sum of our relationship at the point was, ‘strangers in the same field who spend a lot of time insulting each other over the internet’.

His workshop was in South London. Thank God for Uber is all I can say about getting there. I stepped out of the car onto a residential street with brick rowhouses and scraggly, half-dead urban trees. The workshop was a low, rectangular building. It used to be a diary. All of the external windows were boarded up. The place looked abandoned. I made my way over to a steel door. It was the only entrance I could see. It was locked.

I checked my mobile. I was on time. He wasn’t. I wondered if it was a trick. I knocked. Nothing. It was getting cold waiting. I shuffled, stomped my feet, checked Twitter, and gave a few head scratches to a passing moggy. I was about to post my disappointment to the Internet when the door opened.

I said hello, like an idiot, but it was clearly automatic. I peeked my head into the dim interior. I thought about just how bad an idea this was. I clutched my mobile like a lifeline. I went inside.

The door slammed shut behind me. Locked.

Unnerved, I went forward. The space was large, industrial. There were piles of metal sheeting stacked in the corners, empty vats, what looked like a blast furnace. I work alone, but Kapoor obviously had employees to do his heavy lifting. There were sets of safety boots and protective gear in cubbies near the door. I thought about grabbing some, but then I thought, fuck it. I checked my mobile, and the signal was strong. If anything happened I’d just dial 999.

I could hear a steady thumping coming from further in. I followed the sound through an open door next to a bucket of assorted rivets. The room behind it was dominated by a large tank, banks of machinery, fume hoods, and a strong, acrid, chemical smell. The walls were covered with safety warnings. There was an eye wash station and emergency shower off to one side. I hurried through. There were two doors in addition to the one I’d come through leading off this room. The thumping was coming from the one to the right.

I peeked through and saw what I first thought was a person dressed in a metal suit picking up a tin of paint off of a conveyer belt. It brought the paint over to a small canon and loaded it as ammunition, stepped back and let it detonate before picking up another tin and repeating the process. All of the paint was black and purple and red. The far wall of the room looked like a battle scene.

“How long have you been doing this?” I asked the person.

They didn’t respond.

“Hey,” I stepped in front of them. The person walked into me, and kept walking with jarred, unnatural steps. I moved aside and the robot continued its task. The canon thumped. More red paint bled across the far wall.

Remember what I said about art? I found the idea of an automaton programmed to endlessly fire paint at a wall for no reason creepy and wasteful, but you had to appreciate the work that went into it. I don’t think Kapoor meant it to be funny, but when I’ve told other people about this, they’ve all thought that the concept is hilarious.

I left the room and tried the other door. It led to a smaller space with clean white walls and bright overhead lights. It was obviously meant as a temporary gallery space. A place to do mock-ups. There was only one piece on display. At first, I thought it was a mirror. A perfect, reflective circle about a meter in diameter, but then I got closer and realized that a shape had been blacked out on the glass. A dark human figure.

I knew it was Vantablack.

Nothing prepares you for how dark it is. It sucks in all of the light. It is night personified. It is emptiness. And contrasted with the mirror –

I thought the paint robot was creepy, but this was beyond that. Beyond unnerving. It was almost spiritual. I wanted to touch it, but I knew that the stuff was fragile and would probably flake off.

I wanted it. My performance outrage became real. This stuff was important. It had the ability to show something no other pigment did. The visual affecting the physical. I stared into the mirror. The Vantablack perfectly blocked me out, so it was like looking into a mirror and seeing only a shadow instead of your own reflection; a portal into my own soul. Infinite space.

Then that shadowed moved and I nearly fell over arse over tits jumping backwards.

When I recovered and looked closer, I realized that the shadow was moving with me. The Vantablack was crawling across the mirror to cover my reflection so that no matter where I stood I’d be obscured. I took a step closer, to try and figure out how it worked, but every step forward felt like falling into night. After two steps I stopped, still a good six feet from the mirror, and just stared at my Vantablack reflection.

“You came.”

The voice seemed to rumble through my soul.

I turned, and there was Kapoor, standing in the doorway. He was shorter than me, and older, but there was something about his dark eyes that I found equally enticing and intimidating. He wore a black cloak over a black jumper, except, after the Vantablack both seemed washed out grey.

“Yeah,” I said. My mouth was dry. My voice was cracked. I licked my lips. I could feel the Vantablack behind me, even though I wasn’t looking at it. The paint canon in the other room thumped rhythmically.

“Did you bring the pink?” he asked, and if I hadn’t been so thrown by my experience with the mirror and my dark reflection I would’ve noticed the tone of his voice. He was commanding and confident, but also… desperate. As desperate as I was for the Vantablack.

I still had some of my senses though, so I said:

“For a trade, right? Pink for black?” And as I said it, I imagined it: the vibrancy of colour next the inky vacuum of eternity. The pinkest pink. The blackest black. And there was also the glitter I’d brought to sweeten the deal. I hadn’t even announced it to the public yet. Tiny shards of glass that sparkled like a thousand diamond stars. “We could make beautiful art together.”

“Vanta is not any mere pigment,” Kapoor said. “It is a technique. It is a discipline. It is something dangerous which I was entrusted with.”

“I’ve worked with dangerous supplies before,” I said. Ladders. Scaffolding. Spray paint. Carcinogenic pigments. Aerosols. Caustic cleaning agents. Lead white wasn’t just a name.

“You’re such a child,” Kapoor said. “I’ve taken a weapon and turned it into art.”

“And I want to do the same. I want to make the world a better place.”

“And what are you willing to give up to get there?”

He took a step towards me. He seemed to grow taller. The grey-black of his cloak deepened and richened. Something moved out of the corner of my eye. I glanced behind me, and the darkened reflection in the mirror was gone – it was only an ordinary looking glass.

I looked back at Kapoor, and he was transformed.

His face was still human, but the rest of him… I’m going to say raven, because that’s the easiest way to explain it. He looked nothing like a raven, but there were wings, and talons, and something like feathers that gave off a dry, metal-against-metal rustle as he moved. It was difficult to make out details because, from the neck down, every inch of his monstrous new body was clothed in Vantablack. It flattened him into something almost two-dimensional. He sighed and ruffled his not-really-feathers. The thumping from the paint canon seemed to speed up, or maybe it was only my perception of time.

“Your choice,” he said.

I still don’t understand what he meant by that, but I took a step forward and he moved/walked/floated towards me, and –

I don’t tell most people this part of the story because I don’t want to be sectioned. I’m not certain what happened after we touched. I’m not certain it was even Kapoor if I’m being honest. It may have been Vantablack personified, or a possessed body. Kapoor said the Vantablack was a weapon. He didn’t create it. He bought it from military developers. That's public record.

His feathers were sharp and cold. He smelled like the room with the fume hoods, but stronger. He tasted the same. I fell into his blackness and it was like being in a forest without trees, only tall, leafless posts, and a sky full of nothingness. I’m 98% certain we fucked, but I don’t know how to describe the specifics of fucking something so inhuman. Imagining shagging the space between stars, or an industrial solvent factory, or a god.

I’d do it again.

Last thing I remember is glitter spilling out of my pocket. Diamond stars on Vantablack.

I woke up on the floor of my flat with a chemical taste in my mouth. My whole body ached, but I don’t know if that was from whatever Kapoor and I did together or from sleeping on the floor. My mobile was vibrating. That was what had woken me up. I checked it and found hundreds of new texts and tweets telling me to look at Kapoor’s Instagram.

The utter shitting arsehole bastard.

Middle finger in the pink.

I breathed hard through my nose.

My sales exploded after that. Maybe he did me a favour, and who knows, it might have even been intentional. Maybe he was trying to teach me something about cause and effect. Maybe I went on a bender, got pissed, and none of what I just talked about actually happened. The text inviting me to his workshop was gone when I went looking for it later. Maybe he deleted it. Maybe my mobile glitched. Maybe it never existed at all.

I can’t forget what it felt like to be wrapped in Vantablack. I don’t know what Kapoor is doing with the stuff, and I don’t know what the military people who made it meant it for. Nothing good, I expect. But I think I can redeem it. I’m trying to recapture that feeling. He won't answer any of my messages. 

We’re all going to have wings soon, Kapoor.

Except mine are going to smell like cherries.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I've met neither of the two artists involved in this feud. It should go without saying that this is fiction. I have no idea of anyone's real life motivations and I highly doubt Kapoor is actually an eldritch bird monster. He did do an exhibit where a man shot paint out of a gun though. That part is real. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mrWJv6XdiM


End file.
